The Woman on the Corner
by Shu of the Wind
Summary: Naru and Lin have returned from England, and the SPR has a new case. Mai has been stuck fighting with college entrance exams and worrying about her future. While snowed in at a onsen, she has some big decisions to make...and some issues to figure out. MaixLin. Onesided MaixNaru, onesided MaixGene. Semi-sequel to Fingerless. Can be read solo. Gift!fic for fluffydono. Happy holidays!
1. Prologue

**Title:** _The Woman on the Corner_.  
**Rating:** T/T+.

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Ghost Hunt_, the anime, or any of its affiliates. The original book series belongs to Fuyumi Ono. Applies to all chapters.

**Summary:** Naru and Lin have returned from England, and the SPR has a new case. Mai, on the other hand, has been stuck fighting with college entrance exams and worrying about her future. While snowed in at a onsen in northern Hokkaido, she has some big decisions to make...and some issues to figure out. MaixLin. Onesided MaixNaru, onesided MaixGene. Semi-sequel to Fingerless, though can be read solo.

Yet another holiday gift!fic, this time for my lovely friend and roommate, _fluffydono_. Love you, darlin'; have a fabulous time in Japan!

This fic is a 10-parter, because I have too many LinxMai feels to make it a oneshot. So fluffydono should be damn happy and get me stuff from Japan and for once I won't be feeling guilty if she gives me stuff. (Though honestly darlin' you give me stuff all the time, so regard this as one big thank-you.)

On with the show!

Chapter soundtrack:  
"Grief," from _Fate: Zero._

* * *

**File A-63: The Woman on the Corner**

_But our love it was stronger by far than the love  
Of those who were older than we—  
Of many far wiser than we—  
And neither the angels in Heaven above  
Nor the demons down under the sea  
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul  
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.  
_—Edgar Allen Poe

_January, present day_

Her fingers felt like bones.

Mai cupped her bound hands over her mouth and breathed, slow, deep, from her core, trying to get some heat into her palms again. Even with her gloves (which were, unfortunately, fingerless; she hadn't thought she'd been going outside, after all) her hands were totally numb; she couldn't feel anything, no matter what she touched. The stone wall. The dusty floor. Lin-san. Her ankles ached from the zip-ties. Her feet had gone dead from lack of circulation a long time ago. If she had to run, she'd just fall on her butt and get captured again, and there was nothing she could do about it.

Lin-san was still asleep, or unconscious, or whatever it was that happened when someone whacked you on the back of the head with a marble statuette. Mai hesitated, and then tried to take his pulse with her swelling fingers, but they were too cold for her to feel anything other than a vague tingling. She debated about using her nose (which was only moderately less frozen) but then she had a sudden image of what would happen if he woke up to find her basically nuzzling his throat (his wrist was covered, and thus out of the question) and flushed wildly. He was breathing, she reassured herself, even if it was shallow, and he hadn't turned blue. The watch on her wrist read 2:56AM. They'd been here for nearly three hours. He had to wake up soon. He _had _to.

The cut on her throat tingled. Mai took a breath and let it out, trying very hard not to cry. She'd cried enough over the past few hours, and if someone came in to rescue them and found her all snotty and gross she was never going to live it down. Masako hadn't cried, not really, not even when Urado had taken her. Not where Mai had seen, anyway. She took a deep breath and hid her face in her knees for a moment, trying to keep her heart from pounding. There was no point in trying not to shiver. The cold was too much, the _fear _was too much, and she wouldn't be able to stop no matter how hard she tried. They'd been here for hours, no hint as to how _whoever_ had stabbed a needle in her neck and whacked Lin-san on the head had managed to get them here. The chain around her ankle kept her from going so far, even if she hadn't been all done up with zip-ties, and the screws that kept her chain in the wall looked new. There was no way she could just wrench her way free, not without breaking something critical.

Mai rolled her eyes up to the ceiling. If she sat very still (well, as still as one could while shivering themselves to death), and kept very quiet, she could hear Lin-san breathing. In the dull yellow light of the hanging lantern, shadows danced on the walls. She wanted to kill Naru. _We have another case, he says_, she thought bitterly, kicking her feet against the floor to try and get the feeling back. _We're going to Hokkaido_, _he says_. _It'll be nice this time of year, Ayako says. You can build a snowman, Bou-san says. Hah. You can get kidnapped and left in a crypt to die, says the ghost! You can totally do that, Mai. That'll be fun._ The zip-ties had left bruises on her wrists. If ghosts could set zip-ties and use syringes, then she'd eat her own boots. Which meant that whatever had brought them here was totally human.

Panic bubbled up her throat again, and she squeezed her eyes shut and started reciting the first thing she could remember: a poem from the _Hyakunin Isshu_. _Oto ni kiku/Takashi no hama no/Adanami wa/Kakeji ya sode no…something. Something. Nure mo…something. _She took a breath. _English. Make it English. _"While some avoid the…the famous waves of Takashi so they…don't get…wet?" She glanced at Lin-san, automatic, waiting for critique, and then took a deep shuddering breath and forced her eyes away from the dark bruise on his forehead. "I'm gonna guess that's right…While some avoid the famous waves of Takashi so they don't get wet, I…dodge? Your….I dodge your…cunning? Cunning words to…to keep my sleeves dry."

_So I don't cry over you_, she thought, and hid her face in her knees again. That was what dry sleeves meant in old poems. No tears. No sadness. Mai took a shuddering breath and closed her eyes. On Lin-san's suggestion, she'd started using the _Hyakunin Isshu _again to work on her translating skills. Though frankly, she had to translate the poems out of old Japanese before she could get them close to anything in English, but it did make her think. And she knew the meanings of the karuta poems as well as she knew nursery rhymes, anyway. Her mother had run a local karuta club when she'd been a child, and she could remember the slow, rhythmic wavering of her voice as she sang out the poems to local friends. Mai licked her lips. Her mother's favorite had always been _Hear the Haunting Cry of a Deer_, even though Mai had always thought that one was depressing. She'd always liked _Swift Waters Parted by the Jagged Rocks. _She licked her lips, and pulled her knees up tight against her chest. Her toes felt swollen in her snow boots. Mai leaned her head back, staring at the lantern hanging from the ceiling, and sang under her breath.

_Though the stream  
May be divided by a boulder  
In its swift flow  
I know  
That the two  
Will soon reunite  
Again_

There was an eerie echo in this place, this crypt they'd been dumped in. When her voice finally died away, she glanced at Lin-san again. He'd shifted, just a little, hair falling away from his face. He looked very young, she realized, though he had to be twelve or thirteen years older than she was, easily; the hollows under his eyes and in his throat reminded her of a sleeping Naru. She checked to see if he was breathing again, watching his chest rise and fall under the blood-flecked shirt, and then gave into temptation. She sidled closer, easing his head off of the cold stone floor (no bone moved under her fingers; she wasn't sure if that was because of her hands or because nothing was actually broken, but either way it reassured her) and then stretched her legs out to rest his head on her thigh. She knew that as soon as he woke up, he'd glare at her for doing such a thing, but frankly her need for human contact and reassurance (even if it came from a currently-unconscious Lin-san) mattered more than her fear of his wrath at the moment.

His head had stopped bleeding a while ago. She thought that was a good sign. Mai leaned back, staring at the lantern again. She hummed under her breath. Her eyelids felt heavy. She'd cried too much, wasted too much energy. She clenched her feet a few times in her boots, clenched her hands a few times in her gloves, and then closed her eyes. The only weapon she had right now was her brain. Her abilities. If she could dream her way out of this, then maybe they weren't going to die.

She leaned back against the mossy wall, and tried to force herself to sleep.

In the dark stable, something else moved.


	2. Part One

**A/N:**

**For those who asked: This will indeed get a bit racy, but it has to develop a little first. **

Also, no, that is not a typo: the time period between the kidnapping and the start of a case is a few weeks. This is a long-ass case, ladies and gents.

To clarify, this is a ten-part fic, with a prologue and an epilogue. So, twelve chapters, ten parts.

Unbetaed. Apologies for typos or grammatical inconsistencies. There's only so much one can pick up on one's own.

Disclaimer: I do not own _Ghost Hunt,_ the poem "Annabel Lee" by Edgar Allen Poe, or _Lorna Doone_ by R.D. Blackmore.

* * *

_Part One  
A few weeks ago…_

"I don't get this at _all_."

Mai tossed her pencil onto the coffee table in the SPR main office, and then buried her head in her arms. It was probably a good thing, she thought, peeking through the gap between her forearms at the main desk, that Naru was in his own private office and not out here listening to her, because if he had been he would have just made one of his infuriating remarks about the size of her brain and not be helpful _at all._ Not, she thought glumly, that anyone in the SPR could really help her with this problem. Well, except John, maybe, but he was down in Osaka for the week visiting old friends and coworkers and there went her only source for English grammar questions that she had any sort of faith in. Or Yasuhara-san, but he was at class. And then he was going to have to go home rather than come into work, because his sister was sick, and his mother needed to go in for a shift at the hospital.

Damn.

Mai sat up straight again, wrapping a strand of hair around her finger as she stared at the question. _Read the following paragraph in English. Correct all grammar errors in underlined sentences, and then translate corrected sentences into Japanese. _Translating wasn't all that bad, usually, but she still didn't get the difference between _a _and _an _in English and why were Cs and Ss so similar sounding and homonyms were just…dumb.

"This is stupid," she told the paper again, and cursed Hayashi-sensei for a monster.

She'd never been good at remembering English vocabulary, and that had even been before her mother had died and she'd had to work for a living. If her test scores were good enough to get her into even a single college, she would be very, very surprised.

Something about that thought hurt, deep inside her. Mai bit the end of her pencil and stared at the translation section. She'd honestly never thought of herself in college; her grades were middling-to-good, but nothing compared to Yasuhara-san's or any of her friends'. She wasn't particularly good at academics, first of all; she was too impatient to sit and work through anything that resembled math or translation and the only reason she'd managed to get such good grades in traditional Japanese was because of her mother and her work in medieval literature. She couldn't afford to go to a really good cram school, and besides, a cram school wouldn't be nearly so understanding of her frequent need to vanish and make money as her school was. She couldn't afford tutors, didn't have time for study groups, and even though Naru gave her more than enough time off when she needed it to keep up with her homework, she just…didn't connect with it. Not the way she used to, before her mother had died. Not since she'd started working for Shibuya Psychic Research, anyway.

But still. College was just…it was just something you _did. _You could technically stop going to school after you graduated middle school, but most people went to high school, and took the college entrance exams, and getting a degree definitely made it easier to get a job, but still. She already had a job; Naru had promoted her after he and Lin-san had come back from England, from part-time assistant to part-time investigator, and she truly couldn't imagine doing anything else with her life other than parapsychological investigation, not after everything she'd seen.

But still. College.

She scowled at the homework, and then pushed up off the floor to go and make tea. Naru might be obsessed with black tea, but she'd brought her own brand today, and if he complained, well, he could…do her homework wrong for her. Or something. At least then she'd have homework to turn _in_.

She heard the key before she heard the door, and Mai went up on her tiptoes to get at the Assam tea. There were only three people, other than her, who carried the keys to the office. One of them was already in his office. Another was in class, and would be for another four hours. Mai considered for a moment, and then pushed the button on the coffee maker as well. Lin-san would drink tea, but lately she'd caught him making coffee two or three times more often than usual, and she might as well get a head start on him.

Naru had been in here again. The Assam tea was just out of her reach. She was considering dragging a chair over to get at the damn thing when she felt the rustle of something against her ear, a hiss of a ghost. _Shiki_. She glanced over her shoulder. Lin-san had paused in the doorway, his eyebrows furrowing a little. He almost looked confused. "Taniyama-san?"

"Sorry," she said, and rocked back onto her heels. She'd been muttering, she realized. Muttering was never good. "I can't get at the tea. I'm going to get a chair."

"Don't," he said, simply. His eyes flickered to the coffee maker, and the creases in his forehead eased a little. "I can get it."

"No, it's fine, really. I can get it." She went up on tiptoe again. The tin was just out of reach, damn it; she could brush it with her fingertips, but she couldn't get a good grip on it, and there was no counter for her to climb on to just grab the damn thing. Why couldn't she have had PK instead of…whatever it was she had?

The _shiki—_she'd managed to get better at sensing them, since the Yoshimi case—brushed along her ear again. Lin-san reached easily over her head, and then handed her the tin of Assam without a word, ignoring the way Mai's ears went red with embarrassment.

"Thank you," she said.

He nodded, but didn't respond. Instead, he collected his papers again, turned on his heel, and left. As soon as he was out of sight, Mai leaned back against the counter, screwed her hands into her eyes, and began to swear under her breath.

It wasn't as though she disliked Lin-san. In fact, she did honestly like him, but he made it difficult sometimes to…well, to interact with. He was so quiet, and studious, and _serious_, that she could never really talk to him without feeling like she'd managed to stick her foot in her mouth. And that was _after _he stopped looking at her like he wanted nothing more than to see her throw herself and all her Japanese-ness off a cliff posthaste.

She wasn't used to this. She was good at people. She was good at talking to people, at working them out. She always had been; she wasn't sure if it was an overlay from her psychic abilities or if she was just naturally a good people person (honestly, it could have been both) but it gave her an advantage that grumpy Naru and silent Lin-san did not. The fact that there was a person in her own workplace that made her feel like—well, like a little girl trying to talk to a cantankerous, unpredictable uncle—made her want to snarl.

But it was difficult, she reasoned, spooning the tea out into the strainer and setting the water on to boil, to understand someone who didn't allow themselves to be understood. Lin-san was closed up, tucked into his shell like a snail, and as hard as she'd tried, she had never quite been able to manage getting him to…well, talk. Though, she thought, guiltily, she hadn't been trying particularly hard. She'd had classes and exams and assignments and everything else.

_Not an excuse_, a voice in the back of her head muttered. It sounded remarkably like her mother. _Never an excuse._

_I know_. She let out a breath, and began to hum, hooking her thumbs into the pockets of her jeans. _Can't catch a tiger unless you go right into its den._

The clock chimed. Two PM. She had four more hours here, and maybe by that time she'd have managed to get this damn English paragraph translated and fixed. Mai glared at the water until it boiled, collected a trio of mugs and coffee for Lin-san, and then set about her business.

Naru didn't answer when she knocked, didn't respond when she said hello, didn't thank her for the tea. It was only when she was halfway out when he looked up, and said, "We'll have a visitor in half an hour."

"Walk-in or appointment?" she asked.

"Appointment, obviously." Naru sipped his tea, and turned back to his papers. "He made an appointment via my private line. So clear your things off the front table."

"Of course." She frowned, thoughtful. "What kind of case?"

Naru looked at her. Then, carefully, he set his cup down onto his desk again. His office looked rather like a college professor's, she thought; papers and books bursting out of every corner. There was a simple French print of some famous artist hanging on the wall by the window. It hadn't been there before he'd left for Gene's funeral, which meant he'd probably brought it back with him; she couldn't remember seeing it before now. The heavy glass paperweight on his desk flickered in the light from the window.

"He's coming a long way," Naru said, and it was clear that was all he was going to say. He clammed up again, and frowned at his computer. "Pick up your things, Mai."

"Yes, _dad_," she said, and then wished she hadn't because that sounded gross. She shut the door quickly behind her.

Lin-san's office was much cleaner than Naru's. It had an opposite-facing window, fewer books, fewer papers—only a single bookshelf, organized neatly, and a laptop sitting in the place of honor on the desk. He glanced up when she knocked, and nodded. Really, she thought, setting down the coffee, there was no point to her knocking. Lin-san always knew where any of them were when he was in the office.

"I brought you this," she said, and put the coffee mug on the corkboard mug-holder that Naru had insisted they purchase for the entire office. God forbid any of the desk have circles on them from cups. Lin-san blinked at her, tilted his head just slightly, and then the corner of his mouth quirked.

"Thank you."

Mai bit the inside of her cheek. "I'm sorry," she blurted, and he blinked again. "I mean, thank you. For getting the tea."

"It wasn't a problem," he said, but there was a hint of a question in his voice that she didn't quite know how to answer. Maybe _why are you bringing this up _or _why are you still in my office _or _what do you want you silly high-schooler _or maybe even _oh god why did Naru hire you in the first place anyway_. She twisted her hands behind her back.

"Um," she said, stunningly eloquent, and then nearly swallowed her own tongue. He watched her, carefully. "I…I kind of wanted to ask you something."

Lin-san closed his computer, steepled his fingers, and waited. _Ah_, she thought, her tongue going cactus-sharp in her mouth. _This is why I don't talk to him. Having all that attention focused on you is very, very unsettling. _

She groped for words. _Why do you not talk to any of us? _No, that was just accusatory and would probably start a cold war. _I would like to understand how your brain works._ No, that was…that was creepy. Not Urado-level creepy, but serial-killer level just the same. _Does it bother you, staying up all night all the time? _That was just dumb.

She licked her lips, and said the first thing that popped into her head that didn't sound silly. "You know English, right?"

Lin-san blinked. Then he blinked again. His hands fell a little, and to her surprise, the corner of his mouth quirked up. He leaned back in his chair. "I spent four years living in London, and another three near Cambridge."

Mai took this to be a _yes_. "I just—I'm sorry to ask because you're probably working, but so is Naru, and Naru would probably just laugh at me if I asked him, and no one else is here, and we have a client coming in in half an hour, and I have an English translation assignment due tomorrow morning that I don't have a clue how to do and if—if you could help me I would really appreciate it. I'd owe you," she added, because that quirk to his mouth was getting closer and closer to a smile the longer she spoke, and she really, really didn't like feeling like she was babbling. She shut her mouth up tight, and then said, "If you're too busy, I understand. I just—I thought I'd ask because—"

"Taniyama-san." She shut her mouth so fast her teeth clicked. "I would be happy to assist."

She blinked at him. Then she blinked again, and laughed. _I am not blushing. No. I am _not _blushing._ Her powers of self-deception about her own embarrassment were great, but not that phenomenal. She was blushing. She bit the inside of her cheek to make herself stop. "I—thank you. Really. Thank you."

"It's due tomorrow?"

"Yes. I'm really sorry to ask you so late, I just—"

"Bring it in here," he said. "I'll look at it, and then we can work on it after the interview with the new client, if that works for you, Taniyama-san."

"Yes!" She nearly hopped, she was so excited. "Yes, of course that works! Thank you so, so much!"

She nearly bounded around the desk and flung her arms around him, the way she would have done with Bou-san or John. But then she caught herself, bowed, and scurried out of the room.

_That went better than I expected._

Though to be perfectly honest, she hadn't been sure what she had expected at all.

* * *

"I'm sorry to bother you on such short notice." The client was stooped, his eyes red-rimmed, with good teeth and hands so callused that she'd nearly scratched herself when they'd shook. "I wouldn't have come all the way down if we hadn't…if we hadn't been at the edge of the crevasse, so to speak." He twisted his ball-cap uneasily in his hands, looking from Naru to Lin-san to Mai and back again. He licked his lips. "I really am sorry."

For some reason, he reminded her a bit of Akifumi-san, from the Yoshimi case. They shared the same quiet, taut anxiety, right down to their very bones. Mai touched his elbow lightly, and before he could blink, she'd guided him to the couch. "It's all right," she said. "It's what we're here for. I'll get you some tea, if you like."

Without looking up from his papers, Naru lifted his teacup. Mai snatched it out of his hand, and went to refill the pot. It would, technically, have been Yasuhara-san's job if he'd been here, but he wasn't; he apparently had had a family emergency earlier that morning, and they'd been waiting for him to call and explain when this man had opened the door and asked, in a quiet voice, if this was Shibuya Psychic Research. Through the open door to the staff room, she heard Lin-san shift in his chair. "Can I ask your name?"

"Ishikawa Ayumi." The man hesitated. "That's with the kanji for _aruku _and _utsukushii_. I know it's girly. My mom—"

"It's fine," Lin-san said, abruptly. She could almost hear what hadn't been said. _Neither of us really care_. "If you could please state your reasons for coming to SPR, Ishikawa-san?"

Ishikawa-san sputtered a bit, not out of irritation, but out of nerves. Mai bit her tongue for leaving a defenseless country-boy—he'd dropped a plane ticket from Hokkaido when he'd been fumbling with his business card, to give her at the door—alone with Naru the Supreme Narcissist and Lin-san, the Blunt Instrument. Though obviously both those names were affectionate, she thought at whatever deity might be listening, and bounced on the balls of her feet. Couldn't tea steep faster?

"Well," said Ishikawa-san, "it's because of…what happened at my house."

Silence from Lin-san. An even more pointed silence from Naru. _Come on,_ she thought at the teapot. _Come on…_

"We moved into my wife's family's old homestead about a year ago now." She glanced back at the main room. Ishikawa-san had his hands between his knees, his eyes on the coffee table. He licked his lips. "Her side of the family has run an onsen since before anyone can remember, and when her great-uncle died—he was the last proprietor—he left it to her in his will. She grew up there, and she spent a lot of time working as a maid or an assistant. She knows how to run the place, and I…I grew up outside of Sapporo and just wanted to get back to Hokkaido. So we had our wedding in Tokyo, and then went back up north." He shifted uncomfortably. For a long moment, the clicking of Lin-san's keyboard was the only sound. "We had to renovate. Repaint. That sort of thing. We're both pretty well-off financially, so it didn't take too long, and we only had to replace one or two things—a few pipes, the old water heater for the piping, a few floorboards and screens. The rest of it we left pretty much untouched. If we'd done any more construction, I wouldn't be here at all, but…but what's happening can't be explained by what we did. Not really, anyway."

The water was steaming. Close enough. Mai poured some into the teapot, set in the strainer, and added the tea leaves as Naru asked, "What do you mean, 'what's happening'?"

"The first few times, we thought it had to be our imaginations." Ishikawa-san glanced up at Mai as she came back out of the kitchenette, and nodded his thanks as she poured the tea and set a cup in front of him on the table. "Things'd move, y'know. Like when you set your keys down on the counter and then they get covered or something, and you can't find them again. There was a funny smell in the main part of the hotel sometimes, like sewage, but I thought it had to be something I'd done wrong with the pipes, even though we had an actual plumber come out and look at them and give the okay. And guests would report things missing from their rooms, but they always showed up again right before they checked out, so I didn't think much of it. But sometimes windows just…broke for no reason. I had a land surveyor come out and check our property, but he said everything was structurally sound. Even then I thought it was just some local kids throwing rocks, until December."

Naru was so focused on Ishikawa-san, he nearly didn't notice when Mai gave him his ugly green teacup. Nearly. "And in December?"

Ishikawa-san glanced up at Mai again, almost as if he was looking for permission. "My wife has a pair of nieces, about thirteen years old, who came out to stay with us for part of their winter vacation. They're good kids, quiet, sweet; they were excited to come out." He let out a shaking breath, cupped his tea in both hands, and stared into it. "We put them in the bedroom next to ours. Things had quieted down a little, and we had…seven guests, I think, at the time. We're only a small hotel, so twelve is just about all we can manage. Everything seemed fine, but at about three in the morning every window in the house shattered at once. The pictures had all been flipped upside down, in every room, even the guest rooms and in the changing rooms. The smell was back, worse than ever, like there was something dead in the walls. And…" His hands tightened around the cup. "And when I went to check on the girls, they had…bruises on their wrists and ankles, and scabs on their mouths. Like they'd been bound and gagged. We took them home the next morning."

Mai felt something cold touch the back of her neck, but when she glanced around, nothing was there.

"What time was this, exactly? As close as you can remember."

"3:41," said Ishikawa-san, without the slightest pause, and Naru's eyes narrowed. "I saw the clock."

"Has anything else happened since then?"

Mai had just turned her back to give Lin-san his tea when Ishikawa-san laughed. The sound made the hair prickle on her spine. "Sorry," Ishikawa-san said. "It's just, that's like asking if the earth spins around the sun. Every night since then, at 3:41, we wake up to these…sounds. Some nights it just sounds like someone's slamming their hands on our bedroom door, but other nights my wife wakes up screaming because someone's grabbed her foot and yanked her off the bed. I've felt it happen, held her hand when she's suddenly wrenched; it's not her messing around. We've found bruises on her ankles in the morning, shaped like fingers. And when I get up, sometimes I'll find handprints on the front doors, or on the doors to the hot springs. Mixed dirt and blood."

Lin-san's keyboard stopped.

"Have you tried going anywhere else?" Naru said, and when Mai sent him a sideways glance, his eyes were sparking, his attention fully on Ishikawa-san. _That's his interest caught_.

"Honestly, we're scared to try and leave." If he twisted that hat anymore, Mai thought, he was going to rip it in two. "Even when I just go out to get groceries or something, the shutters and screens rattle like there's a hurricane. My wife doesn't like being alone in there, but if she tries to leave, all the doors open and slam, so we've started staying on the phone with each other if we're not in immediate line of sight, just so I know she's all right."

"Any phone interference?"

"Static sometimes, but that's normal, considering how far out of regular cell phone range we are. I'm surprised we get reception at all, most of the time." Lin-san added this to the document he had up on his laptop, and Mai turned quickly away before he realized that she was spying shamelessly. "We've asked everyone in the family who's ever visited this house, and nobody's ever heard of anything like this happening. It certainly didn't happen when my wife's great-uncle owned the place. Or if it did," he added, "nobody's talking about it. We'd ask the great-uncle, but he died about four years ago of a heart attack; that's how my wife inherited the house in the first place."

"I see." Naru steepled his fingers, and then flicked his eyes to Lin-san. After a moment, he said, "We'll require space to work. A room we'll use as a base is important. We'll also be bringing in most of our team, so two other rooms, one for men, one for women, will also be necessary. How many guests are staying at the onsen, currently?"

"Only two," said Ishikawa-san, "In the off-house. Nothing's happened out there." Then his eyes lit up, and he looked ready to smile for the first time since he'd come into the office. "You mean you're taking it?"

"We can't not," Mai said quickly, before Naru could put his foot in his mouth, "not in good conscience." She sat down next to Ishikawa-san and smiled at him. "We'll be out in the next few days. If you could leave your contact information, we'll call to let you know when we're on our way."

Ishikawa-san beamed. It made him look years younger, and he wasn't all that old to begin with, maybe his late twenties at the very most. He looked more like a college student than anything. To her shock, he stood and bowed so deep that his body turned into a right angle. "Thank you! Thank you so much! I can't tell you how—thank you so very, very much!"

Mai shifted uncomfortably. Lin-san stared at his computer. Naru just inclined his head, like a prince taking a commoner's supplication. "We should be there within thirty-six hours. We just need some time to gather our people."

They questioned Ishikawa-san for about half an hour after that. _Was anything that ever moved itself hot or cold? _(Hot, usually.) _Did you ever hear any voices? _(No.) _Was there any pattern to the tapping sounds? _(Four some nights, seven or thirteen on others.) _Did you find anything unusual while the house was under construction? _(No.) _What about before or since? _(Not that he could remember.) It was only after Ishikawa-san had finally drawn a map of his property and mentioned that his wife would know her family history better than he would that Naru let him escape. Once Ishikawa-san had bowed his way out of the room, Mai shut the door behind him and let out a long breath. She looked at Naru.

"Poltergeist?"

His mouth tightened. "Impossible to determine without further research. You know that."

"It fulfills four of Tisane's nine conditions." She wrinkled her nose, and started to tick things off on her fingers. "Explosions, knocking sounds, doors that open and close on their own, objects that move position, things that appear out of nowhere—"

"Not proof," Naru said icily, and stood, collecting his cup. "Track down Yasuhara-san and the others. Once that gets done, go and start researching. I want to be out of Tokyo by noon tomorrow."

He turned his back and slammed into his office before she could muster up a reply. Lin-san, of course, had vanished as soon as she'd walked Ishikawa-san out the door. Mai scowled. "As you command, oh Supreme Ruler of All."

"And make more tea!"

Wondering if she could possibly get away with dumping a kettle of hot water on her boss's head, Mai checked the teapot (almost full) and brought it in to Naru before heading for the phone.

Yasuhara-san's family emergency turned out to be nothing. His sister had woken up with a bad cough, and because his father was on a business trip and his mother had a long hospital shift, he had to keep an eye on her until late. As it was, though, he somehow managed to track down more information about the Ishikawa house while keeping an eye on his sick sister than Mai and Bou-san combined, and all within an hour of her calling him up to see how he was doing. The document he'd emailed her was nearly forty pages long, _and _had contact information for local historical societies attached. All she could do was shake her head and smile at the enthusiasm.

There had been a few things she'd managed to find out for herself, before Yasuhara-san had sent her his findings. The Ishikawa house had been built roughly a century or so before the present day, in the middling bits of the Meiji Period. It had been a farm at first, but towards the end of the period someone had discovered the hot springs and built an onsen around it. Large parcels of the land had been sold off over the decades, until it had been whittled down to the ten acre by five acre patch that Ishikawa Ayumi and his wife, Erisa, now called home. The first owners hadn't been the Ishikawa, however, but rather a family called Aoyama, which had died out very soon before the start of the twentieth century. Then Yasuhara-san had emailed her, and then they'd been swamped.

It was in history, Naru had lectured her, that most of their questions, as ghost hunters, could be answered. D_eeds_, he'd said, when she'd finally been promoted from part-time assistant to part-time ghost-hunter-in-training. _Any headlines you can find about the place, track them down and take note. Go through Google, go through the _Tokyo Shimbun_, local papers, websites both occult and general; go through everything you can think of. Transcribe the history of the house from its beginning. Nine times out of ten, it is in cold, hard facts that we find our answers—not in the case's human element. _

Nine times out of ten, Naru had said. In Mai's opinion, it was more like six or seven. Sure, a lot of the time they figured out a case through pure information, usually gathered before they even started the camera-and-thermometer investigation, but at the same time it was _through_ that human element that they put all the information together. After, not before.

She wasn't about to say that to Naru's face, however.

Yasuhara-san's huge stack of papers, however, hadn't yielded much more information than they'd already had. He'd managed to get a hold of all the names of all the men or women who had been listed as the house's owners, at one point or another, along with whatever people had been registered as living inside that house. (Sometimes Mai wondered if he had an illegal contact within the government's administration, to get official information like this; she'd never quite dared to ask.) Staring at all those names gave her a headache, so eventually she just gave up and went home a little early to pack and let her school know that she would be missing classes, so could she _please _get her homework in advance so she could work on it on the plane?

The vice principal hadn't been particularly happy to hear that she was heading out again, especially so soon after the last case (that one had been down in Kyoto, and boy, had she had nightmares for weeks afterwards) but she'd sworn to transmit Mai's request to all her teachers, and finally Mai flopped back on her futon and stared at the glow-in-the-dark constellations she'd put up on the ceiling at fourteen years old, and finally let herself breathe.

Only a few months left of school, and though she had her college entrance exams in a few weeks (the very thought made her stomach roll) she'd barely had time to study for almost a year. It would be wrong to say that it was the SPR's fault, especially considering how easily Naru would give in to her requests for time off to work on school (at least, compared to how hard it was to convince him to let her take a break for any other reason), but at the same time it was difficult to rule them entirely out of it. She was nearly eighteen, and other than continuing her work with Shibuya Psychic Research, she truly had no idea what she wanted to do with her life.

_Graduate_, she thought. That was the first thing. Graduate, and then if she actually managed to get some studying in (she winced at the thought of all the cram school she had missed) then she could maybe start thinking about colleges. _Maybe_. And that solely depended on how good a score she could snag during the actual exams. Not that she ever tested well, anyway. Mai groaned, and pressed a pillow over her face. Logically she knew she should be asking for help from _someone_, but besides Yasuhara-san, who had his own college courses to worry about, she wasn't sure she actually _knew _anyone who'd be willing to help her study. Naru was definitely out of the question, as both boss and genius; Bou-san had never gone to college; Ayako…who knew about Ayako, really. Masako would just laugh at her, John had gone to seminary school in Australia, for goodness' sake, and Lin-san…the thought made her cringe. No, Lin-san was out of the question entirely.

Mai threw the pillow across the room, and glared at the ceiling for a little while longer before going to pack her things. If Naru wanted them out of Tokyo by noon tomorrow, they'd probably be leaving at ten at the latest.

Honestly, she thought, as she pulled out her battered little suitcase and dropped it onto her futon, the only thing she could really picture doing with her life anymore was this. Parapsychology. Ghost hunting. When she thought about what her classmates were doing, setting themselves up to be businesswomen and CEOs and doctors and whatever else they wanted to be, she couldn't imagine it. Dressing up in a suit every day, going to work with a thousand other people, shuffling through paperwork that meant nothing but headaches—there was nothing in that that appealed to her. She was good at research, she'd discovered; maybe not as good as Naru, or Yasuhara-san, but she was good at it. And she might not be as powerful a prayersmith as Bou-san or John or even Ayako, when she was in the right surroundings anyway, but she practiced whenever she could. And she was getting better, she knew she was. This was what she wanted to continue doing, she told herself, as she folded her underwear and shoved it into the suitcase. This life, right here. Whether she managed to get into college or not.

Speaking of college, she'd managed to duck in to Lin-san's office before leaving. He was a better English teacher than John _or _Yasuhara-san, she thought, in a vaguely surprised way, because she hadn't expected that in the slightest. He'd read through the piece calmly, coached her through the grammar errors (which hadn't been that difficult, when she'd really looked at it) and then when she'd struggled with translating it, he'd just…assisted. He hadn't ever told her the answers, but she'd completed the assignment in less time than English translation had ever taken her before. It had turned out to be stupidly complicated for one, very simple reason: it had been the first paragraph from _Lorna Doone_, and the writing style had been so ridiculously old-fashioned and complex that that was what had given her a headache in the first place.

She wondered if she could hire him as a tutor.

This wasn't the time for that. Mai seized a few T-shirts, hesitated, and then dug into her closet for her jackets. _Hokkaido means snow, doesn't it?_ she thought, and forced them into the suitcase too. _Better to dress warm than not._

* * *

Lorna Doone opening paragraph:

"If anybody cares to read a simple tale told simply, I, John Ridd, of the parish of Oare, in the county of Somerset, yeoman and churchwarden, have seen and had a share in some doings of this neighborhood, which I will try to set down in order, God sparing my life and memory. And they who light upon this book should bear in mind, not only that I write for the clearing of our parish from ill-fame and calumny, but also a thing which will, I trust, appear too often in it, to wit—that I am nothing more than a plain unlettered man, not read in foreign languages, as a gentleman might be, nor gifted with long words (even in my own tongue), save what I may have won from the Bible, or Master William Shakespeare, whom in the face of common opinion, I do value highly. In short, I am an ignoramus, but pretty well for a yeoman."


End file.
